Walter Hooper

Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963


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about four years. It was his publisher, Geoffrey Bles, who decided they should appear one per year.

      Turning to the second theme of these letters–Cambridge–many readers wonder why Oxford did not honour Lewis with a professorship. There is nothing to suggest that Lewis was hurt, much less angry, about this, but his friends were hurt for him. J. R. R. Tolkien felt that he and Lewis would be ideally suited for the two Chairs at Merton College, the Chair of English and the Chair of English Literature. But while Tolkien was elected Merton Professor of English in 1945, the Chair of English Literature, when it became vacant in 1947, went instead to Lewis’s former tutor, R P. Wilson. Lewis was passed over again in 1948 when the Goldsmith’s Professorship of English at New College went to Lord David Cecil, who often said, ‘This chair should have gone to Lewis.’ While Lewis’s reputation as a literary scholar will probably always be overshadowed by Narnia and his apologetics, he was the author of a number of works of literary criticism that have taken their place with the classics, notably The Allegory of Love (1936) and A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942).

      I met Professor Tolkien in 1964, having not long come from the United States. When he saw how perplexed I was by Oxford’s attitude to Lewis he explained it to me:

      One of the most pleasant parts of the ‘revolution’ that occurred in the last thirteen years of Lewis’s life was the offer of the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University, created with him in mind. We are fortunate in having not only Lewis’s side of the correspondence about the Chair, but that of the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, Sir Henry Willink, who offered him the position. That correspondence, which begins on page 470, is as full of unexpected twists as an Agatha Christie novel, and I will say no more than that I hope the reader enjoys it.

      By the time I moved into The Kilns Mrs Shelburne was writing more letters than Lewis could possibly answer, and Lewis decided to end it. He had me take out my notebook and write down the names of the two people I would be totally responsible for—Mary Willis Shelburne and Margaret Radcliffe, a one-legged nurse who was always threatening to move into The Kilns and ‘Iook after him’. Lewis felt he had written enough to them, that he had said all there was to say, and he chose to reserve a little time for the things he wanted to write.

      I once asked how he managed to write with such ease, and I think his answer tells us more about his writing than anything he said. He told me that the thing he most loved about writing was that it did two things at once. This he illustrated by saying: ‘I don’t know what I mean till I see what I’ve said.’ In other words, writing and thinking were a single process.